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The culture clash between British reserve and Hollywood brashness has sustained Episodes (BBC Two) across four seasons of increasingly acerbic comedy. As it returned for its fifth and final run the transatlantic satire once again struck an enthusiastically bleak tone, even the cheapest laughs carrying a faint tang of acid.

Matt – Friends star Matt LeBlanc playing a grotesque caricature of himself – was having success with a dreadful Big Brother style game-show, The Box. But with the public embracing his new persona of chipper prime time host, the acting offers (such as they were) had dried up. His coping method was to sulk in his dressing room chugging beer and then to get frisky with a contestant.

Things weren’t much better for fish-out-of-water British husband and wife writing team Sean (Stephen Mangan) and Beverly (Tamsin Greig). They were LeBlanc’s one-time collaborators on dreadful sitcom Pucks, a garish American adaptation of a mild-mannered hit they’d penned back in the UK. Now they were professionally marooned in LA and wriggling under the cheerfully oppressive thumb of Sean’s old comedy partner Tim (Bruce Mackinnon) – a zen tyrant who forced the pair to miss a Madonna concert so that he could foist home-cooked pancakes on them and the rest of his writing staff.

Episodes, a collaboration between Hat Trick Productions and American’s Showtime network, harks back to a largely defunct sub-genre of showbusiness spoof in which a household name sends themselves up. The formula was popularised by the Larry Sanders Show and perfected on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Here, the guinea pig was LeBlanc, portrayed as a self-serving lunk with the attention span of a dim insect and the acting skills of a walnut dresser.

Kathleen Rose Perkins and Tamsin GreigCredit:
BBC

The parody was funny but thin, onscreen LeBlanc being little more than a moderately denser version of Joey from Friends (whose co-creator David Crane is a show-runner and co-writer of Episodes). However, Episodes remains game for putting its characters in grim places and much of its potency derives from its willingness to venture where more mild-mannered sitcoms would not dare. Beverly fantasied about suffocating Sean with a pillow just so she could get out of working for Tim.

And a slightly drunk LeBlanc ended up engaging in a bizarre explicit act with one of the contestants from The Box (bizarre because she was inside a sealed container). Unfortunately for him, his nemesis at the network, Merc Lapidus (John Pankow), arranged for the indiscretion to the transmitted on the show’s Big Brother-style live feed. This was darker than it was funny – the perfect encapsulation of Episode’s cruel yet undeniably effective approach to comedy.